MPEG LA counters Google WebM with permanent royalty moratorium

MPEG LA has allayed fears that it could start charging royalties for online …

The MPEG Licensing Association—the group responsible for handling the necessary patent licensing for use of MPEG video codec standards—has announced that it will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free. The group earlier this year had extended its limited moratorium on licensing fees for free Internet video until the end of 2015.

Today's announcement by the MPEG LA extends the time period of the moratorium for the life of its "AVC Patent Portfolio License," effectively making free-to-view H.264 encoded video royalty-free indefinitely. The MPEG LA noted that licensing fees will still be in effect for video that consumers pay for, such as AVC-encoded Blu-ray discs, on demand services like Hulu+, and pay-to-download services like iTunes.

The move to effectively eliminate licensing fees for free Internet video is likely an effort to prevent Google's new WebM standard, built with technology it gained from acquiring On2 last year, from gaining any serious traction as a de facto Web standard for video. Despite Google's backing and support planned for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera browsers, the MPEG LA has suggested that the VP8 codec used by WebM is likely covered by patents held by its member companies. If WebM does prove to be encumbered by the same patents as H.264, which is already widely used for online video, there would be little reason to switch away from H.264 in its favor.

144 Reader Comments

There seems to be a lot of people here who think Mozilla's not supporting H.264 is a stance based on principle only. While I'm sure principle probably plays some part, the main issue is many of the licenses they distribute Firefox under prevent them from being able to distribute any patented capability that they can't perpetually pass along a free patent license for.

They could, like other browsers, choose to leverage OS provided codecs which could gain them H.264 support (among other codecs).

When was the last time an XP or Vista user received a notification about a security update to his H.264 decoder?

overall, this still doesnt help HTML5 video gain steam without a standard format, as it would just be easier to continue with Flash video.

Conveniently Adobe is adding WebM support to flash. Google is almost certainly working with Android vendors to bring WebM support to their smartphones. It looks like pretty much everything besides iOS will be WebM capable in a few years. Will YouTube drop H.264 support at that point? Doubtful. Will people adding video support in the future bother adding H.264 in the first place? That is the interesting question.

Besides all of that, when (if?) YouTube rolls out a HTML5 version that plays (almost) all videos, *I* won't have to mess with Flash, and I can't help, but consider that to be a good thing.

How is the H.264 codec code handled in FFmpeg (the project behind H.264 support in various players including VLC and MPlayer)? That project is LGPL and has had the codec for ~5+ years and as far as I can tell hasn't paid a dime in royalty fees to anyone.

How is the H.264 codec code handled in FFmpeg (the project behind H.264 support in various players including VLC and MPlayer)? That project is LGPL and has had the codec for ~5+ years and as far as I can tell hasn't paid a dime in royalty fees to anyone.

You can't download the compiled version from websites based in America. There are "unofficial builds" which work just fine, of course.

They eliminated nothing; they only promised that they would not add anew royalty after 2015. This does not affect *all the royaltiescurrently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.We're still not allowed to distribute any software that uses AVC/h.264for free, and that's still a big deal. If they added the samelanguage to the software licenses, then we're talking.

It's a PR play, though a good one: give an inch as a way to try toavoid being forced to give a mile. It's a step forward, no way to deny it,but doesn't change anything much for technology providers. This is thesecond time this year that MPEG-LA has made a press release causing a wave of 'IT'S FREE!' articles without actually changing anything in the pricing structure.

How is the H.264 codec code handled in FFmpeg (the project behind H.264 support in various players including VLC and MPlayer)? That project is LGPL and has had the codec for ~5+ years and as far as I can tell hasn't paid a dime in royalty fees to anyone.

You can't download the compiled version from websites based in America. There are "unofficial builds" which work just fine, of course.

Ahh... The Great United States of America... The Land of the Free, Freedom to Achieve, Freedom to Innovate, Freedom to be Wealthy...

It seems both Opera and Mozilla will have to use an OS native decoder (thereby licensed by the OS manufacturer) to render <video>, creating the worst kind of cross-platform spaghetti code - each platform will have to handle <video> differently - DirectVideo in Windows, Quicktime in OSX, Whatever in Linux. Might as well use a browser plug-in!

Oh the humanity! <video> was Opera's idea!

As apposed to including their own codec that then have to hook into the OS via DirectX, Quartz/OpenGL, whatever.... and then maintaining this glue code between codec and low level OS APIs as the OS get revised. Then if they want hardware decode offloading they then have to use additional OS (possibly hardware specific) APIs.

As developer I much rather handoff not only the codec to the OS but all of the rendering of that content as well. This will result in LESS spaghetti code in my browser not more. Also I would be using higher-level OS APIs that are far more likely to be stable across OS releases. The other benefit in using the OS facility for video/audio is getting access to far more codecs then you would likely be interested in trying to support/deliver with your browser.

Bingo. Obviously, not many people here are software engineers, or at least competent software engineers. You abstract the OS-specific pieces away in an abstraction layer; re-targetting the browser is a matter of rewriting a relatively thin adaptation layer.

You WANT to take advantage, as much as possible, of OS and HW specific facilities while at the same time minimizing impact to the majority of the code. Admittedly this might be a tad trickier for open source OS's, but I could imagine some driver-level code that ships with the machine hardware of which such OS's could avail themselves--the hardware vendor pays the license. This is no different than the situation with hardware accelerated video. So, far this doesn't seem to be a fundamental barrier to open source operating systems.

No, this is very good news and with any luck it will accelerate the rise of HTML5 and the decline of Flash.

There seems to be a lot of people here who think Mozilla's not supporting H.264 is a stance based on principle only. While I'm sure principle probably plays some part, the main issue is many of the licenses they distribute Firefox under prevent them from being able to distribute any patented capability that they can't perpetually pass along a free patent license for.

Again, this is nonsense. You use OS-specific facilities or HW-specific drivers in an adaptation layer. No need to actually ship a decoder. In fact, you don't want to. A lot of hardware is providing direct support for H.264. You want to use that and the HW/OS vendor should give you the ability to use it. THEY pay the license fees.

They eliminated nothing; they only promised that they would not add anew royalty after 2015. This does not affect *all the royaltiescurrently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.We're still not allowed to distribute any software that uses AVC/h.264for free, and that's still a big deal. If they added the samelanguage to the software licenses, then we're talking.

It's a PR play, though a good one: give an inch as a way to try toavoid being forced to give a mile. It's a step forward, no way to deny it,but doesn't change anything much for technology providers. This is thesecond time this year that MPEG-LA has made a press release causing a wave of 'IT'S FREE!' articles without actually changing anything in the pricing structure.

MontyXiph.Org

Wrong. Perhaps you have stake in the game, eh? Read what shawnce has written and read it again until you understand it.

All this does is maintain the status quo past 2015. WebM came about because Google, among others, wasn't satisfied with the status quo.

All? That's quite a bit. I guess it depends on what you see as "status quo" though. A big problem was the uncertainty about future licensing costs for clients. That's a huge risk. MPEG LA could have gotten everyone hooked on H.264 and then in 2015 gouged on client licenses. That risk has been removed. I think that is quite significant.

They eliminated nothing; they only promised that they would not add anew royalty after 2015. This does not affect *all the royaltiescurrently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.We're still not allowed to distribute any software that uses AVC/h.264for free, and that's still a big deal. If they added the samelanguage to the software licenses, then we're talking.

It's a PR play, though a good one: give an inch as a way to try toavoid being forced to give a mile. It's a step forward, no way to deny it,but doesn't change anything much for technology providers. This is thesecond time this year that MPEG-LA has made a press release causing a wave of 'IT'S FREE!' articles without actually changing anything in the pricing structure.

And really, you're asking if Xiph.org is involved in video compression? Been living under a rock?

geo_2 wrote:

Read what shawnce has written and read it again until you understand it.

haha such arrogance. shawnce makes good points, but its not really relevant here. Using the OS provided library really only matters if you have an OS provided library available (and even then theres arguments for and against it...). Ironically the MPEG-LA's licensing terms and unwillingness to adequately protect their formats in court has lead MS and most linux vendors to avoid shipping H.264 decoders whenever possible. I doubt making youtube 'Windows 7 or above' only is appealing to Google. In that case they might as well just stick with flash forever.

geo_2 wrote:

A big problem was the uncertainty about future licensing costs for clients. That's a huge risk. MPEG LA could have gotten everyone hooked on H.264 and then in 2015 gouged on client licenses. That risk has been removed. I think that is quite significant.

Reread the OP and/or Xiphmont's post. Client licensing hasn't changed. Whats changed is licensing on streaming video (e.g. the cost charged to a company providing H.264 content). You still pay for the software just as before.

Again, this is nonsense. You use OS-specific facilities or HW-specific drivers in an adaptation layer. No need to actually ship a decoder. In fact, you don't want to.

Same question: when was the last time an XP user received a notification about a security update to his DirectShow H.264 decoder? (Apparently Vista received a Media Foundation H.264 codec a month and a half ago, so I'm withdrawing my complaint there.) I wouldn't want to be the one exposing random DirectShow codecs to untrusted Internet content.

So if you have a business making pay to view "cough" videos, what codec would you prefer? I think that for companies concerned with the cost of licensing, WebM is still an interesting option.

This depends on whether you would like your business to be profitable. WebM video can only be played by Google Chrome and unreleased versions of Opera and Firefox. By comparison, practically everyone can play H.264 thanks to Flash.

This depends on whether you would like your business to be profitable. WebM video can only be played by Google Chrome and unreleased versions of Opera and Firefox. By comparison, practically everyone can play H.264 thanks to Flash.

Could you be any more misinformed? Opera has had webm support in a stable version for quite a while now.To paraphrase: H264 can only be played by Safari, Chrome and an unreleased version of IE. By comparison, everyone can play webm thanks to Flash.

…WebM/VP8 is from what I've read a horrible horrible standard, much of which isn't truly documented (just 'what this here C code does' basically), has features that make it difficult to implement in hardware, and has slightly lower quality than h.264…

Fortunately, the situation is getting better. The ffmpeg people decided to build their own implementation, ffvp8, reusing ffmpeg code and optimizing things, and they are pretty happy with their first results.

Could you be any more misinformed? Opera has had webm support in a stable version for quite a while now.To paraphrase: H264 can only be played by Safari, Chrome and an unreleased version of IE. By comparison, everyone can play webm thanks to Flash.

What a rude reply… To answer your first question; yes it is possible to be more uninformed than I am. You're not exactly fully informed yourself, for what it's worth.

I did not known that Opera has been able to play WebM for “quite a while”, or 1.5 months. You should also note that the Adobe page you linked does not speak of WebM support, but only the VP8 codec. By comparison, Flash supports the exact same MP4 files using H.264 video and AAC audio that Safari, Google Chrome and the IE9 previews support. This has been the case for quite a while, or three years; Adobe added MPEG-4 support to Flash in 2007.

You WANT to take advantage, as much as possible, of OS and HW specific facilities while at the same time minimizing impact to the majority of the code.

Everyone here is focused on and seeing only the desktop OSes. This is not a play for the desktop OS; Moz and Google are looking forward to mobile. Jobs thinks the desktop is 'over' as anything but a zero-margin commodity (or worse-- pure overhead) and that in 10 years 'computing' will be predominantly on mobile handhelds. I think he's mostly right. So does Google.

WebM is about vertical integration and Google controlling its entire mobile stack from top to bottom. If video is a big part of your future strategy, it makes no sense to outsource all the core technology to an adversarial outside organization with its own agenda and control-freak tendencies. In short, Google is entirely concerned about the places where there's guaranteed to be no bundled OS-specific h.264 decoder, because they'd be the ones that would have to pay for and bundle it.

In addition, and part of the above scenario, MPEG-LA has tried hard to corner the market. With no effective competition, does anyone believe for a second that MPEG-LA would be even pretending to compete on price point?

I smell a rotten fish in the changes in the MPEG LA license. It still looks far too restrictive in that it points directly to playback from the Internet only. What about simple data file playback and the media encoding process? Things you typically do on your Linux, Windows, or Apple workstation.

I hope Google continues their work and we end up with a completely unrestricted and fully free (as in FOSS) media encoding/decoding process. Add that to OGG. History repeats itself and I fail to see the advantage of going with MPEG LA, who are more interested in dragging people into court and extracting fees from each and every party along the way. I believe the only reason they are changing their license at all is to blow smoke into the Google plan because they fear that they (MPEG LA, and co) will become yet another notch less significant in the media world.

How is the H.264 codec code handled in FFmpeg (the project behind H.264 support in various players including VLC and MPlayer)? That project is LGPL and has had the codec for ~5+ years and as far as I can tell hasn't paid a dime in royalty fees to anyone.

It sounds like you are on an Apple mobile device. Flash does tend to be a pain.

They eliminated nothing; they only promised that they would not add anew royalty after 2015. This does not affect *all the royaltiescurrently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.We're still not allowed to distribute any software that uses AVC/h.264for free, and that's still a big deal. If they added the samelanguage to the software licenses, then we're talking.

It's a PR play, though a good one: give an inch as a way to try toavoid being forced to give a mile. It's a step forward, no way to deny it,but doesn't change anything much for technology providers. This is thesecond time this year that MPEG-LA has made a press release causing a wave of 'IT'S FREE!' articles without actually changing anything in the pricing structure.

And really, you're asking if Xiph.org is involved in video compression? Been living under a rock?

Dense today are we? There are two ways of looking at it: 1) The licensing terms haven't changed. 2) The licensing terms haven't changed, but could have--before. The licensing terms haven't changed and now won't--after.

I wasn't asking if Xiph.org was involved in video compression, just pointing out that he has some skin in the game and is not naturally unbiased. You missed that, I guess.

redleader wrote:

haha such arrogance. shawnce makes good points, but its not really relevant here. Using the OS provided library really only matters if you have an OS provided library available (and even then theres arguments for and against it...). Ironically the MPEG-LA's licensing terms and unwillingness to adequately protect their formats in court has lead MS and most linux vendors to avoid shipping H.264 decoders whenever possible. I doubt making youtube 'Windows 7 or above' only is appealing to Google. In that case they might as well just stick with flash forever.

Nonsense. If no OS, you use drivers just like any other type of platform dependent system--like video cards. You're not a software engineer are you? But, you seem to be not only a legal expert, but also an expert on the business strategies of Microsoft and Linux vendors--arrogance, indeed. I don't even know what this means: "I doubt making youtube 'Windows 7 or above' only is appealing to Google. In that case they might as well just stick with flash forever." Are you implying that a standard can only be used in an implementation specific way? As far as Google just sticking with Flash--they've shown that they want to move on, if for no other reason they need something that actually works efficiently on mobile platforms, where the growth is. That, by itself, would be enough to move them and others to video standards that can, and are, efficiently decoded in HW. Yes, everyone would like to have something for nothing, but the current licensing for H.264 and now we know the terms for client and non-commercial use won't change. H.264 has a lot of HW support now, it works well, is high quality, and has low risk for submarine patents. Best we take the opportunity and get off Flash ASAP.

redleader wrote:

geo_2 wrote:

A big problem was the uncertainty about future licensing costs for clients. That's a huge risk. MPEG LA could have gotten everyone hooked on H.264 and then in 2015 gouged on client licenses. That risk has been removed. I think that is quite significant.

Reread the OP and/or Xiphmont's post. Client licensing hasn't changed. Whats changed is licensing on streaming video (e.g. the cost charged to a company providing H.264 content). You still pay for the software just as before.

Perhaps I used a little loose language, but the point is that free use at a client is not subject to licensing costs--you buy the computer or mobile phone and you indirectly pay the license costs because the manufacturer paid them and rolled that into the cost of the product; nobody's going to charge you to continue to use H.264. You DON'T want to roll your own decoder in software anyway. Perhaps you're under the impression that the computer and mobile phone you use result from simple material costs and all the patents and IP used to make them are open, free, and unencumbered? Perhaps you think your modern life is not supported by patented technologies? May I humbly suggest you apply your idealism equally to all technologies.

Again, this is nonsense. You use OS-specific facilities or HW-specific drivers in an adaptation layer. No need to actually ship a decoder. In fact, you don't want to.

Same question: when was the last time an XP user received a notification about a security update to his DirectShow H.264 decoder? (Apparently Vista received a Media Foundation H.264 codec a month and a half ago, so I'm withdrawing my complaint there.) I wouldn't want to be the one exposing random DirectShow codecs to untrusted Internet content.

You misapprehend the scope of my comment. Let me be a little more clear:

1) Ongoing vulnerabilities in SW are a fact of life.

2) Software, regardless of commercial or open source, are not necessarily patched quickly.

3) Browsers like Firefox run on top of an OS and use facilities of the OS, which leaves them open to platform-specific vulnerabilities on those platforms.

Firefox will have vulnerabilities itself, which may not always be patched quickly. To the extent that Firefox uses any OS capability it will be susceptible to platform vulnerabilities. You're not suggesting that Firefox is a stack unto itself, are you? In the case of H.264 are you suggesting that Firefox should decode everything in SW custom written just for Firefox? Seriously?

1, 2, and 3 demonstrates that H.264 is not unique. Good advice would be to choose platforms that do a good job of minimizing and patching software vulnerabilities. Laying these problems on H.264 is a red herring.

This does not affect *all the royalties currently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.

geo_2 wrote:

Wrong.

geo_2 wrote:

The licensing terms haven't changed and now won't--after.

geo_2 wrote:

Dense today are we?

lmao

Monty is wrong because you agree with him, and I'm dense because I have to explain that to you what it is you think.

geo_2 wrote:

I wasn't asking if Xiph.org was involved in video compression, just pointing out that he has some skin in the game and is not naturally unbiased.

No I'm pointing out that you don't need to say that the people backing WebM have an interested in WebM. its just not as insightful as you seem to think.

geo_2 wrote:

You're not a software engineer are you?

Actually I sort of am. I worked on one embedded video player, and ages ago some of the Xiph code that eventually went into WebM. I don't really do software engineering in the formal sense of applying engineering principles to software design, but I am quite familiar with the idea.

geo_2 wrote:

But, you seem to be not only a legal expert, but also an expert on the business strategies of Microsoft and Linux vendors--arrogance, indeed.

Ha. I didn't realize my posts were so impressive. But I'm not a legal expert, although I have read a lot about law and business because they're interesting topics.

geo_2 wrote:

That, by itself, would be enough to move them and others to video standards that can, and are, efficiently decoded in HW. Yes, everyone would like to have something for nothing, but the current licensing for H.264 and now we know the terms for client and non-commercial use won't change. H.264 has a lot of HW support now, it works well, is high quality, and has low risk for submarine patents. Best we take the opportunity and get off Flash ASAP.

flash can also be efficiently decoded in hardware as well as H.264 (since it is H.264), and is on a lot of platforms (Android, etc). Arguably it has a lower risk of submarine patents though, at least for vendors, since its Adobe that distributes it. I mean if you're google you can either keep using flash and have no risk at all of patent troubles, or switch to webm or h.264 and have risk. So from that point of view, flash is actually a pretty good deal.

redleader wrote:

geo_2 wrote:

A big problem was the uncertainty about future licensing costs for clients. That's a huge risk. MPEG LA could have gotten everyone hooked on H.264 and then in 2015 gouged on client licenses. That risk has been removed. I think that is quite significant.

Reread the OP and/or Xiphmont's post. Client licensing hasn't changed. Whats changed is licensing on streaming video (e.g. the cost charged to a company providing H.264 content). You still pay for the software just as before.

but the point is that free use at a client is not subject to licensing costs

Yes a client is. The MPEG-LA reserves the right to charge each and every client a fee. Go read their license terms. What you are saying is simply a load of shit.

redleader wrote:

--you buy the computer or mobile phone and you indirectly pay the license costs because the manufacturer paid them and rolled that into the cost of the product; nobody's going to charge you to continue to use H.264.

Tell that to everyone who bought Vista or XP. There is no H.264 license included. None. So you must pay. Not to mention there are various levels of licensing.

Really though, you were wrong about licensing. Stop bullshitting. Its better to be wrong and honest then wrong and full of crap. At least people will respect the former and we can move on to more interesting things.

Could you be any more misinformed? Opera has had webm support in a stable version for quite a while now.To paraphrase: H264 can only be played by Safari, Chrome and an unreleased version of IE. By comparison, everyone can play webm thanks to Flash.

What a rude reply… To answer your first question; yes it is possible to be more uninformed than I am. You're not exactly fully informed yourself, for what it's worth.

Sorry, I tend to do that when I see false information claimed as truth with high confidence.

Quote:

I did not known that Opera has been able to play WebM for “quite a while”, or 1.5 months. You should also note that the Adobe page you linked does not speak of WebM support, but only the VP8 codec.

This does not affect *all the royalties currently in place* and both Google and Mozilla still can't use it.

geo_2 wrote:

You're not a software engineer are you?

Actually I sort of am. I worked on one embedded video player, and ages ago some of the Xiph code that eventually went into WebM. I don't really do software engineering in the formal sense of applying engineering principles to software design, but I am quite familiar with the idea.

'nuff said. You could have just said that and omitted the rest of your post. So, basically you don't really know much about software ENGINEERING--"in the formal sense" :-) Add that to the fact that you too are a partisan to the debate (your connection to Xiph) and that explains quite a bit your attitude. It's pretty obvious who is doing the "bullshitting".

Frankly, I don't care either way who wins as long as happens quickly and results in good open standards--note, I didn't say "free", which would be nice, but not essential if license terms a RAND. If VP8 is the best way to get there quickest, that's fine with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it is and your attempt at FUD is simply childish. This is a big change, as the 2015 was a big uncertainty that has now been removed. It isn't necessarily an ideal situation and won't satisfy everyone, but it doesn't have to in order to become the dominant standard for HTML5 video. We've done quite well with patented and licensed interoperability technologies, for example MP3. There's no reason to believe that H.264 will be much different in that respect.

Could you please provide some background for this claim? The one provided earlier specifically spoke of VP8, the video codec. This is not the same as WebM; a container format mandating VP8 for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio. It's not unlikely that Adobe would use VP8 in the same way they used VP6: in an FLV container.

Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.

Supposedly Google is open to improving the bitstream format — but this seems to conflict with the fact that they got so many different companies to announce VP8 support. The more software that supports a file format, the harder it is to change said format, so I’m dubious of any claim that we will be able to spend the next 6-12 months revising VP8. In short, it seems to have been released too early: it would have been better off to have an initial period during which revisions could be submitted and then a big announcement later when it’s completed.

Update: it seems that Google is not open to changing the spec: it is apparently “final”, complete with all its flaws.

It isn't necessarily an ideal situation and won't satisfy everyone, but it doesn't have to in order to become the dominant standard for HTML5 video.

To be the dominant standard, a codec needs to come as standard with the major distributions of 3 browser engines: Gecko, Trident, Webkit.

So much for that, then.

That's a gross oversimplification and actually appears to be wrong to me. I've never developed on a web browser or even looked at the code, but I can't understand what a layout engine has to do with decoding video. At most, all the layout engine would have to do is look at the metadata in the container to know how to layout the video on the page, I think. If that's not the case, please tell me how decoding is relevant to a layout engine.

As far as the oversimplification part, if Safari and IE9 went H.264 that, in itself might be enough to give the win to H.264. YouTube, already supports H.264, BTW. More importantly, mobile is where the growth and power consumption concerns are. H.264 is already in HW for these platforms, though some have announced future support for VP8. VP8 is late to the game and I think the biggest contribution of VP8/WebM is forcing MPEG LA to remove the uncertainty in free licensing. However, if you are right then we're going to be stuck with Flash for a few more years until VP8 gets rolled into HW in order to efficiently support mobile platforms before it is really viable. That, in my mind, is not a good outcome. Forget Ogg, it is inferior and I don't believe anyone has committed to support it in HW, though I could be wrong.

I"ve already explained how Firefox can support H.264 without licensing the decoder. That's the right thing for Mozilla to do. If they refuse, they could easily become irrelevant--that's coming from a long time Firefox user. Frankly, I've noticed a lot of flakiness with Firefox lately and it sucks power by idling at about 10% CPU utilization on my Macbook. So, as much as I hated to (Firefox has better cookie control and NoScript), I had to ditch it on the Mac. I still use it on Windows, though, flakiness and all. I fear Firefox has seen its zenith. Perhaps its major contribution is destroying IE's hobbling of web standards.

Please. H.264 is already supported on YouTube, Android, iOS devices, Windows, and Mac. Even many low-end devices support H.264 in HW--per device licenses paid. Other OS' like Linux and BSD could support it through HW drivers--again, per device licenses paid. Certainly, Firefox will have an influence, but as I said Mozilla can support H.264 through the platform. If they refuse to do so, then Firefox will be hobbled. Still going to put your money on WebM?

You're still on with this schtick, aren't you? Mozilla will never be stupid enough to rely on the platform at the very least as long as XP is relevant. If you disagree, you should think about and respond to the points in my previous post (about how third-party DirectShow filters don't have an automatic patching mechanism).

edit: and it really isn't just about platform support. It's about principles. Pragmatism never changed the world.

I"ve already explained how Firefox can support H.264 without licensing the decoder...

Yes, but it means that it CANNOT be assumed that a major chunk of the market supports H.264 without native support in Firefox, and it CANNOT be assumed that a major chunk will support WebM either, because of Microsoft's lack of support for it.

I"ve already explained how Firefox can support H.264 without licensing the decoder...

Yes, but it means that it CANNOT be assumed that a major chunk of the market supports H.264 without native support in Firefox, and it CANNOT be assumed that a major chunk will support WebM either, because of Microsoft's lack of support for it.

Flash is, ironically, the safe and more widely distributed option.

No, that is not true. It CANNOT be assumed that ALL deployments of Firefox support H.264 if they choose to go the route I suggest, though in theory most could because most video cards and mobile platforms will support H.264 in HW--HW that YOU WANT TO USE. If Mozilla does not go that route then, obviously, MPEG LA will have to be overcome that. Whether Mozilla has enough pull to enforce its will has yet to be seen. After all, for most of the market (Windows and Mac) users have other choices. For now, Mozilla has no pull in mobile. Linux and BSD users might have issues, but they don't have enough market share to truly make a difference here. Don't assume that the Firefox "major chunk of the market" is static. Choice is a good thing.

Since I've been participating in this discussion, I've been looking a little closer at this and I've seen nothing to fundamentally change my opinion. However, I will admit that the H.264 license terms for content providers do seem complex. MPEG LA would do itself a big favor by simplifying the terms and giving free open source software a break on licensing fees.

It is true that Flash is the status quo. Hopefully that will change because Flash has so many problems, and not just for video. I find top-to-bottom Flash web sites extremely annoying because all the tooling and add-ons that work for normal HTML content are useless. Flash is also a resource hog and has so many more potential avenues for security breaches. I'm for anything, VP8 or H.264, that helps us solve this problem the bestest and the fastest. I think H.264 is a better bet, but if VP8 is I'm fine with that too. But I don't like partisans pretending that this change by MPEG LA means nothing.